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#ShoutYourAbortion Gets Angry Shouts Back

Amelia Bonow and a friend, Lindy West, created the hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion on a Twitter account. “A shout is not a celebration or a value judgment; it’s the opposite of a whisper, of silence,” Ms. Bonow said.Credit
Carl Kiilsgaard for The New York Times

The goal, according to Amelia Bonow, 30, who posted on Facebook on Sept. 19 that she had had an abortion at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Seattle last year, was to encourage women who had kept their abortions secret to speak up — in an effort to reframe the debate on the subject.

“A shout is not a celebration or a value judgment; it’s the opposite of a whisper, of silence,” Ms. Bonow said in an interview. “Even women who support abortion rights have been silent, and told they were supposed to feel bad about having an abortion.”

But less than two weeks after she and a friend, Lindy West, created the hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion on Twitter, Ms. Bonow’s building name has been made public, and she has temporarily left her apartment, bothered by angry Twitter messages wishing her dead. The effort went viral and drew more than 150,000 Twitter posts, showing how volatile and emotional an issue abortion still is four decades after the Supreme Court declared it legal.

The idea behind Ms. Bonow’s campaign was to make clear what it means that one in three women have had an abortion. She wanted women to talk about it openly as Congress investigates Planned Parenthood and debates cutting off its funding because of undercover videos showing officials of the group’s discussing providing fetal tissue for research.

While the campaign was started in response to the Republicans, the organizers were also challenging the traditional Democratic mantra first articulated by President Bill Clinton and repeated by Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama — that abortion should be safe, legal and rare. Nancy Northup, the president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, an advocacy group, said a better goal would be safe, legal and where we live.

Some women said the hashtag amounted to a recognition that a social movement had to go beyond legal strategy and a battle of laws.

“The problem for a long time was that this stigma felt like a negative cloud,” said Kate Cockrill, the executive director of Sea Change, a nonprofit organization she helped found two years ago to attack the stigma. “There has been so much focus on legal strategies, and not a lot of attention to strategies for culture change.”

Many of the Twitter messages showed the emotion surrounding the decision to have an abortion. Some women wrote about being pregnant and scared at 15, or living with an abusive man who might harm a child. Many were already mothers, but said they were not ready for another child when they discovered they were pregnant.

Others called the women who chose abortion murderers and selfish people who should have placed their unwanted babies for adoption.

Samantha Updegrave, a Seattle writer who posted on Twitter that she had had an abortion when her son was 4 because it was the best decision for her family, said, “I got some bad responses, but I also got nice reactions from other mothers who’d had an abortion after they had a child, or before.”

“When I talked to them,” she added, “I realized that I was carrying around some residual shame, and this was destigmatizing.”

But the hashtag also brought comments from people who said they were repulsed by what they saw as celebrating murder.

Ms. West, best known as a writer for Jezebel, was the other founder of #ShoutYourAbortion.Credit
An Rong Xu for The New York Times

It has been very rare for women to come out in public about an abortion.

During a legislative battle in 2011, Representative Jackie Speier, her eyes narrowed and voice choked with rage, revealed on the House floor that she once had an abortion. For three riveting minutes, Ms. Speier, Democrat of California, denounced an amendment, which later passed, to take federal financing away from Planned Parenthood.

“I’m one of those women” who had an abortion, she said, adding that it was because of a medical emergency. “For you to stand on this floor and suggest as you have that somehow this is a procedure that is either welcome or done cavalierly or done without any thought is preposterous.”

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The Seattle women who chose to bring abortion from the shadows this time around are writers and activists: Ms. Bonow has been a writer, psychology graduate student, bartender and publicist for artists. Ms. West is best known as a writer for Jezebel. To jump-start their campaign, they wrote essays for The Guardian and for Salon urging women to speak out without apology.

“One of the final hurdles is getting it into people’s heads that the reason for an abortion doesn’t matter,” Ms. West said in an interview. “Women own their own bodies, and you just can’t force someone to bring a baby into the world.”

On her Facebook page, Ms. Bonow said: “Having an abortion made me happy in a totally unqualified way. Why wouldn’t I be happy that I was not forced to become a mother?”

Not just the creators of the campaign but also many who joined in on Twitter said they had received angry reactions and threats. Ms. West said a fake account had been created for her deceased father, Paul West. One message from that account read, “Why are you so proud of killing my grandchild?”

Jessica Blankenship, a New York editor with a 3-year-old son, wrote on Twitter that not becoming a mother at 20 had allowed her to become the kind of mother she is now proud to be.

“I tweeted three times and each time got 20 or more responses, saying things like “baby killer” and “your child is waiting to forgive you in heaven,” she said in an interview.

Another hashtag, #ShoutYourAdoption, was created in response to the campaign, for those who had chosen adoption over abortion. It drew more than 8,000 responses.

“When you’re faced an unwanted pregnancy, you can choose the heartbreak of placing a baby for adoption, or you can end the baby’s life,” said Liberty Pike of Portland, Ore., who works for Oregon Right to Life and posted several Twitter messages last week. “I think the right to life should always trump the right to live as you choose.”

Some of those who posted in favor of abortion rights were longtime advocates, like Ruby Sinreich in Durham, N.C.

“I saw the ‘shout your abortion’ thing on Facebook or Twitter, and I thought, ‘That makes sense,’ ” said Ms. Sinreich, 44, who had a late-term abortion her senior year in high school. “In high school, I didn’t tell a soul except my mom and dad, not a single friend my age. My parents told me not to talk about it at school. It was embarrassing.”

Ms. Sinreich, who now has a 6-year-old son, first posted on Twitter in September: “In 1988 a late-term abortion got a teenage me back on track for college, career, & motherhood.”

She followed up with another post: “It’s been over 25 years and I’ve never regretted my decision not to become a teenage mom.”

Hashtag activism, she said, can be an important tool, especially when the cause is decentralized.

“You see a hashtag, and it connects you to this whole community, so you see you’re part of this larger thing,” Ms. Sinreich said. “It’s not the be-all and end-all of activism, but it can change minds, and it can change the conversation.”

This week, #ShoutYourAbortion posts dwindled to a couple thousand a day, with fewer people sharing their stories and the chain devolving into both sides arguing the usual points on the issue.

Ms. Bonow said she was not certain how long she would stay away from home. “There was not a specific, credible threat,” she said, “but I’m not a public figure; I’ve never dealt with anything like this, so I don’t know how seriously to take it.”

Michael Gold contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on October 2, 2015, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: #ShoutYourAbortion Gets Angry Shouts Back . Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe